Planet Of The Apes (2001 version)

The Apening

Planet Of The Apes
USA 2001
Directed by Tim Burton
20th Century Fox Zone B Blu Ray

Warning: There are spoilers in this one folks.

I think I might be right in saying that this was the first mainstream Hollywood film to use and publicise the word “reimagining”... a term we all pretty much hated at the time and that, I think, has finally died down. Burton was apparently insistent that the term be used due to the fact that he didn’t consider what he was doing to be a remake of the original film (reviewed here) and, also, because it still didn’t follow the course of the original novel, Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet.

In actual fact, the film is further away from the way the premise is presented in the original novel than the previous version but, although it's less to do with evolution and more to do with either inadvertently or deliberately manipulating time, the end of the movie is closer to the novel, in some ways, than Rod Serling’s much celebrated and deservedly more popular Twilight Zone style ending involving the Statue Of Liberty.*

That being said, I was always somewhat disappointed in this version, especially on this rewatch and considering it’s by an artist of Burton’s pedigree... mainly because it just generally seems to get a bit dull from around the mid-way point. But there are also a lot of really good things about the movie too so... let’s take a look at this thing.

The film abandons the original premise of a long trip with suspended animation and instead gives us a group of scientists in a space station sending out trained monkeys to pilot little capsules and bring back data from an anomaly they are parked near. Indeed, Burton manages a nice little piece of “rug pullery” when we realise that the pilot at the start of the movie is a) in a simulator and b) a chimpanzee.

Mark Wahlburg plays Leo, the equivalent of Heston’s Taylor in the first movie, but he’s a different kind of hero and although he’s a sensible chap, because the apes are made out to be so powerful and physically dextrous in this version, there’s no way he’s ever gonna really beat one in a fair fight. I think this may be one of the reasons this movie didn’t quite hit the right note with audiences when it was first released... because the main protagonist is constantly having to be rescued and always seems so vulnerable... he just doesn’t seem to hit the right “hero” notes that Heston did in the original. This is not necessarily Marky Mark’s fault, though, and he’s always seemed to me to be a fine actor... I just don’t think the character works as well as written, given the intense environment into which he is plunged.

Anyway, the space station is hit with all kinds of disruption coming through the anomaly and Leo’s favourite monkey is sent out in a pod to investigate. When he disappears into the anomaly, Leo disobeys orders and goes out in another capsule after him... also disappearing in the process. I should probably note here that it’s fairly well established in these opening moments that the capsules presumably don’t retain oxygen because both the monkey and Leo have to wear a space suit and helmet to go out in the pod. Plant that away in your memory for a short while... I’ll come back to it later.

When Leo crash lands on the Planet Of The Apes, the realisation of the new environment he finds himself in is not as gradually or intensely done as in the original movie. I’m assuming Burton jettisoned certain things because of the audience already knowing exactly what the plot of the original is and so, this movie’s variation of the hunt sequence is done and dusted within minutes of Leo’s arrival and it’s not long before he is escaping from his captors... including Tim Roth as main bad guy General Thade. He fleas in the company of a group of humans including a half hearted but sexy attempt at love interest for Mark Wahlburg’s totally disinterested character, Daena, as played by Estella Warren, plus three apes including Helena Bonham-Carter’s amazing turn as Ari and the always astonishing Paul Giamatti as Limbo.

One of the main problems with this film is that all the humans can speak and are pretty articulate... which is a very definite deviation from the original movie and which, I think, doesn’t help things in terms of the logic of the movie. I can understand that Burton might not have wanted to take the time to set up a way of communicating with the humans due to the dense amount of material to get through (this movie is actually slightly longer than the original as it is) but the established fact in this version that the humans outnumber the ape population and are all quite articulate begs the question as to why they’ve remained in captivity all these years... even with the apes’ greater strength. And there are other curiosities which this state of affairs brings into question... like the scarecrows seen at one point, used to try and discourage the humans from straying into places the apes don’t want them to. It’s the humans that explain why the scarecrows are there to Leo... so it’s quite obvious this is an absolute nonsense attempt as a long established deterrent on the part of the apes... doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, does it?

After this, we have a bunch of humans converging on the source of the signal which Leo is tracking, leading him into the basic conundrum of the movie... the fact that the world here has been created by his colleagues and their trained monkeys going through the anomaly and crash landing at a point many centuries before he even got here... thus leading to the rise of the apes. There’s also a point when an army of humans gather to help Leo and he becomes an almost Christ-like figure to them... which is interesting but remains unexplored mostly... I think one of the problems with this movie is that there’s too much subtext getting in the way of the direct route from A to B.

Then we have a real problem after Leo’s monkey arrives days after him... which makes perfect sense within the logic of the anomaly but, hell, makes a lot less sense when Leo uses the pod to return home without actually needing a space suit or helmet at this point. Pardon? It was shown twice in the first quarter of an hour of the film that a spacesuit and helmet were needed when piloting one of these things through space... so why have the laws of physics changed by this end sequence?

So let’s get to that ending then. Now, readers of the novel will know that, while both adaptations of this novel change a lot of stuff... Burton’s ending is a lot closer to the original. There’s a piece of design of the crashed spaceship Leo finds in the desert that makes it look like the head piece of the Statue of Liberty when viewed from certain angles. Now I think that was both a visual homage to the original movie and also, I would guess, since some photos of this were released well before the movie came out, something to deter the speculation on sites like Ain’t It Cool News that this movie would have a radically different ending to the first. As soon as we all saw those first photos we all thought... hey, there’s the Statue Of Liberty. However, this really is just a design thing and in this version, just like in the book, the Earth really isn’t the Planet Of The Apes at all...

In the novel, when the main protagonist makes the long, suspended animation return trip to Earth, he finds himself returned to another planet with the apes as the dominant culture and the penny drops that, contrary to popular belief, apes actually evolved from man and, in the time it’s taken him to get back, the same thing has happened on the planet Earth in his absence. Burton jettisons the evolutionary aspect and has Mark Wahlburg’s character return to an ape infested Earth, but in this one it’s made pretty clear that this is because the ape villain General Thade has arrived on Earth before Leo did and altered the course of human history.

Now a lot of people didn’t understand this when the movie first came out but, frankly, I’ll say what I said then, again, now... it makes perfect sense. In the movie we saw that the later you go through the temporal anomaly, the earlier you arrive. The monkey went through a few seconds before Leo and took a few days to arrive after him. Leo’s colleagues went through a number of hours, perhaps even days after he did, and arrived hundreds of years before him. So, assuming the exact same rules apply for a trip back through the anomaly, rather than a reversal of the rules, if Thade somehow managed to learn the secrets of the wrecked technology years after Leo left and went through the same anomaly, then he would have arrived many centuries before Leo and that is obviously what must have happened here. Makes perfect sense... one of the few things that does in this movie.

Despite all the drops in logic, the movie is a fairly a solid and diverting entertainment, for the most part... but it’s also a bit flat. The story itself is less than well written, I believe, but the dialogue is top notch with some beautiful rivalry between the two female leads as they play off against each other for Leo’s attention. Searing lines like “He’s the canary, that’s the coalmine.” when talking about launching the monkey into the heart of the distortion is very sharp and there are a lot of lines which are witty and economical, cutting to the heart of the matter, throughout.

There are also a lot of jokes such as an ape organ grinder with a little performing human, which is exactly the kind of humour I would expect from Tim Burton, who mostly does a good job with this movie. Not too mention quite a few sly references for fans of both the Apes series of films and of science fiction in general. For example, the first time you hear an ape talk it says, “Take you hands off me you damn dirty human” in direct parody of Charlton Heston’s famous line in the first movie. Heston himself, playing an ape for the first time in the form of General Thade’s dad, gets to parody his own last line in the original movie as he dies in this one... “Damn them. Damn them all to hell.” There’s also a bit of a humorous irony which I’m sure, given Heston’s personal politics, Burton took great relish in exploiting, by having Heston’s character the only ape in the movie to possess a firearm. And there’s even a quick excerpt from the original (and best) version of The Day The Earth Stood Still in an incoming transmission of anomaly distortion seen in the opening sequences of the movie.

One of the best things about this movie is the score. Jerry Goldsmith’s music to the original was an extremely important and groundbreaking score in it’s orchestration and when I heard about this version being made I thought it was a pretty thankless task because, whoever landed the gig was going to find themselves compared to the classic Goldsmith and they would find that a particularly hard shadow to escape. Being that it’s a Tim Burton film I assumed he would try and get his regular collaborator Danny Elfman but I just couldn’t see Elfman wanting to do it. The original score is such a colossal work. As it happens, Elman’s score here is completely different and, although he does go in for highlighting the percussion in some sections, as you would expect from an Apes score, he does it in a totally different way to any of the previous Apes composers and it holds up as a really appropriate and way more than competent piece in its own right. Which surprised the hell out of me, I can tell you. It’s truly not nearly as important or experimental as Goldsmith’s offering but it’s a real asset to the movie and an equally important score in Elfman’s own body of work, I believe.

All in all, and for the reasons I’ve described above, Tim Burton’s Planet Of The Apes is not the most successful “reimagining” in film history, but it is as inventive as you would expect from an artist of Burton’s capabilities and has some great performances in it which really lift it a bit more than some of the previous efforts. It’s certainly better than Battle For The Planet of The Apes and at least as good, perhaps a little better, than Beneath The Planet of The Apes. A fascinating science fiction/fantasy film which might have built a second franchise on it if it had been a little more critically well received and, presumably, did a little better at the box office. Not exactly the best out of the films but certainly not the worst either and it at least helped pave the way for general audience acceptance that there could, once again, be more Apes movies. So far it’s been up hill for the franchise again, since this stand alone movie.

* It has come to light since I wrote this review that Serling did not come up with the idea for the famous Statue Of Liberty reveal. Click on my review link below of the book Simians and Serialism for more details.

Planet Of The Apes at NUTS4R2

Planet Of The Apes 

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes

Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes

Battle For The Planet Of The Apes

Planet Of The Apes TV Show (live action) - to be reviewed

Time Of The Apes - to be reviewed

Planet Of The Apes (Tim Burton)

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes  

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

War Of The Planet Of The Apes

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes

Simians And Serialism - A History and Analysis of 

Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Planet Of The Apes 

San Andreas

Shaken Not Stirred

San Andreas
2015  USA/Australia
Directed by Brad Peyton
UK cinema release print.

I’m sure I probably mentioned this before, last year, in my review of Into The Storm (reviewed here) but I’m not much of a person for disaster movies. I saw some of the John Williams scored classics when I was a kid... such as Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno (the building of which features in a scene in the film I’m reviewing here now)... and so I am trying to see more of these things because the specific kind of mass destruction which isn’t instigated by hordes of invading alien armies is something I’ve never really paid much attention to in the cinematic landscape.

I was in two minds whether to go and see this movie or not but the reviews saying this was the dumbest thing on screens in a long time kinda sealed the deal for me... I was hoping for, at the very least, an entertaining review. And I have to say that, surprising me in the process, I actually had a better time at the movies with San Andreas than I had the night before when I saw Jurassic World (reviewed here). Sure the science is completely buggered up (as it is with the dinosaur films, obviously) and it’s full of characters doing insanely stupid things (just like that dino movie) but I guess, even though it’s a festival of disaster movie clichés stuck together with some pretty blatantly silly and familiar script points to give it some kind of story arc, I was just expecting a lot less of this film than I was of the higher concept Jurassic Park sequel... so without my expectations raised above a point any higher than hilariously bad, I actually saw... yeah, kind of a mess of a movie, to be sure... but a really fun mess with a nice heart to it plus some nice performances midst the terrible dialogue.

Okay, so the plot involves Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson as Ray, who is handily, considering the subject of this thing, some kind of rescue helicopter pilot who specialises in getting people out of near death situations. This is set up in the first ten minutes of the film with a daring escapade where Ray and his team go to rescue a woman who has been ‘quaked’ in her car so that she is stuck inside said vehicle, perched vertically on the side of a cliff. As Ray’s helicopter views the situation, it’s clear from the constant creaking and slight movements of the car that the down draft from the rotor blades are making the vehicle even more unstable. So Ray does what any good, gung ho rescue guy does in a summer blockbuster kind of movie... he takes the helicopter even closer... because, you know, we need the suspense of the vehicle slipping as his team try and rescue the lady while her predicament becomes less and less stable. Hmmm. Anyway, when one of Ray’s crew gets himself into just as much trouble as the person they are trying to rescue, we get to see Ray become a one man International Rescue and save the day with his bravery and derring do. Hey, it worked for me and I’m really not knocking Dwayne Johnson here... I think The Rock is a solid and watchable personality and he gives a credible performance saying even the cheesiest of lines in some films. He always takes it all very seriously and he always delivers his best. It also helps a lot that he actually looks like he could do some of the ludicrously dangerous things he gets into in the movies. So, yeah, dumb character but... well played and he still has my admiration for rescuing the credibility in some of the roles he finds himself in.

So, anyway, Ray is on his way to see his daughter Blake (played by Alexandra Daddario who is someone with a figure who, trust me, you really need to see in an earthquake movie... for reasons that may become obvious to some of my readers) and his wife Emma, played by the lovely Carla Gugino. Emma is divorcing Ray because of certain emotional communication problems Mr. Rock’s character has. However due to the various upcoming quakes predicted by scientist Lawrence, played by the always amazing Paul Giamatti, mother goes off to see a completely strange and irritating non-character played by... of all people... the lovely Kylie Minogue, while her daughter hangs out with new Dad Number 2, architect Daniel Riddick, played by “the real Reed Richards” himself, Mr. Ioan Gruffudd... the films token human bad guy who, it has to be said, doesn’t have too much time to make the transition from reasonable husband material to less than trustworthy, not very nice person before getting himself killed by having a big, heavy object landing on him.

And that’s one of the main problems with this film actually. The characters are all set up in a way that they seem to just be paying a token service to famous character clichés of movies of the past without actually getting a chance to really inhabit the role before the story function of their character’s plot device is fulfilled and we’re onto the next thing. So when Blake is rescued by two English brothers, one of whom is her new love interest, the film focuses on the daughter and her two new found fiends surviving and trying to get to higher ground in the hopes that her dad will find them... seeing as he’s Mr/ Rescue and all. This is cross cut with the other story arc in which we see Ray rescue his wife from the roof of a crumbling building and then having a bit of a disaster punctuated road movie journey to find their daughter... via helicopter, plane, truck and boat... while at the same time rekindling their own romance due to Ray suddenly feeling he’s able to express his emotions about the daughter they had who died years ago... just in time to use that set up as an ironic, “oh my gosh my other daughter is going to die and I failed to save her too” scene which turns out... in the end... exactly the way you know it’s going to turn out.

So... no surprises here and the stupidity of the people and science in some scenes is, to be fair, quite hard to swallow. However, that being said, there’s also some really nice stuff in here.

For instance, the characters may all be stereotypes but the performers are all doing their best and, although the actors in question aren’t quite able to render their characters anymore 3D than what’s been written on the page for them, they are all doing a really good job in at least keeping them likeable (or unlikable if that is the intention). So there’s that. Added to this, the things these people have to go through in this movie says a lot about the quality of the cast. It seems that a lot of the acting team were doing a fair amount of their own stunts in this one and you do see it on the screen in a lot of the shots. I remember sitting watching an underwater scene near the end of the movie thinking... wow, these people are really putting themselves through this for their craft. I suspect that certain sections of the production of this probably come well under the category of “gruelling film shoot” and so more power to the team of actors in this one... especially The Rock and Alexandra Daddario.

There’s some nice camera work in this movie, too. One brief shot from above a wrecked city looking down through the clouds took my breath away and I wish they’d have just let that one play out for a little longer than the couple of seconds needed for it to fulfil its function as a transitional establishing shot. Also, in regards to the photography, special effects and editing all working together in harmony... job well done. There is a lot of disaster strewn chaos and stuff happening through a lot of the scenes as earthquake after semi-unexpected earthquake assail our heroes but, and this is quite an amazing feat, it’s all choreographed in such a manner that you can see everything that is happening without getting confused and, because of the way it is shot, everything leads into something else in a logical fashion without causing you to lose your bearings amid all the madness. So, really, congratulations to all involved in this production.

One last thing... Andrew Lockington’s score for this one deserves a special mention. Now, I didn’t get to hear a heck of a lot of it, for sure, because the sound effects and design are pretty overpowering (which is one of the reasons why I’ve ordered a copy of the CD... so I can explore it way from the film) but there was definitely something interesting going on here and there were a couple of moments where the sound design and musical score kinda met each other, which really stood out for me. There’s a whole lot of rumbling, crashing and so on in this film’s audio track and, one of the key things they seem to be doing here is to put a lot of creaking in to indicate structural damage which is about to kick off again... as a way of ramping up tension. However, there were certain times in the movie where things were a little bit quieter... and this is where Lockington uses big drumrolls which kind of sound like a musical way of indicating that same instability. There were points where I couldn’t tell where the rumbling was starting and ending as the score took over. In fact, I began to get uneasy when I heard the drum rolls in case it meant something else was going to come crashing down on the main protagonists any moment. So, again, job well done on that and I’m looking forward to hearing the score unencumbered by the movie.

And that’s about it for San Andreas. The dialogue is lousy and there’s a visual moment right at the end of the movie, when the dust has settled, so to speak, which is really unbearably cheesy and it involves the American flag. It’s a terrible, terrible, over the top moment but, I guess that’s in keeping with the nature of the film and so I can kind of forgive it. Now, I’m aware that this film shares a lot of things which I was less than happy about in the new Jurassic World movie but, I’ll say it again here... I wasn’t expecting anything too high concept on this one so I really didn’t stumble out of this one disappointed. It may not be the best disaster movie around but it certainly had some nice things about it that other, more accepted movies of this nature could have done with and, at the end of the day, what with all the clichés attacking the audience left, right and centre, it had its heart in the right place. Not exactly the best movie your going to see here but if you like to see big structures toppling and lots of running about... well, you could spend your money on a lot worse at the cinema right now.

John Dies At The End

Moustache You To Leave Now

John Dies At The End
USA 2012
Directed by Don Coscarelli
Another World 
Danish Blu Ray Region B

Warning: Slight content spoilers, I guess.

There’s a really old joke/story that goes something along the lines of a young whippersnapper pointing to a 'genuine stone age axe' in a glass case in a museum. A curator comes over to the interested party and starts telling of the history of the 'genuine stone age axe' in question. The handle was replaced once in the 1950s and the axe head was replaced twice during the 1970s. And that’s yer genuine stone age axe for you.

Don Coscarelli’s relatively new movie, John Dies At The End, starts off with a really entertaining, deadpan and gory variant of this old joke as a pre-credits sequence... instantly bringing a smile to the face and clueing you in on exactly the kind of movie this is going to be... one in which you definitely need to have your sense of humour along with you for the ride.

I’ve been a fan, of some sorts, of Coscarelli ever since seeing the original UK TV spots of his first Phantasm movie, with the silver ball flying over the boy’s head as he flattens to the floor, back in 1979... and then, catching up to the actual movie on TV ten or so years later. Of course, I can’t tell you exactly when those adverts ran because, according to the IMDB at time of writing this, the movie wasn’t released in cinemas in the UK but... I grew up in that era and, take it from me, it definitely played in cinemas here (I remember walking past the cinema with the poster from it on my way to school every day while it was showing) and it definitely had adverts running on the ITV channel in the UK (the one channel out of the only three broadcasting in the UK at the time, that had commercial breaks... so better days).

I love the four Phantasm films, can remember loving Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster at the time (although I can remember pretty much nothing about that one) and especially adored his movie Bubba Hotep, where an ageing Elvis and JFK, living an existence of sorts in an old peoples home, have to take on a soul sucking mummy to save the souls of their elderly colleagues. Yeah, there’s always been a big sense of humour in this director’s works, even the more serious pieces, and maybe that’s why this film, based on the novel John Dies At The End by David Wong, is particularly suited to Coscarelli’s screenplay treatment and is, in my opinion, one of his most accessible, possibly even the greatest, of his works so far.

The cast of mainly unknown actors is headed up by Chase Williamson as main protagonist Dave Wong (the writer of the novel, I guess), Rob Mayes as the titular John and the wonderfully cute Fabianne Therese as the amputee Amy. There’s also the always wonderful Paul Giametti, who co-produced the picture, plus a really great turn from a dog called Bark Lee... played by himself according to the notoriously inaccurate, aforementioned IMDB. I have to say, that this film was in very good hands with the cast and crew in this one and was a hoot right from the word go. Comedy situations have always been a good match for the horror film because, grim humour aside, the rules of the genre are so simple that it was one of the first to successfully combine itself with comedy. Think about why those 1940s & 1950s films like Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein, Old Mother Riley Meets The Vampire (aka Vampire Over London) and Abbot and Costello Meet The Mummy were so well received at the time. This is a tradition which is still very much alive today, of course, and films like this are our modern equivalent of that phenomenon, to some extent.

John Dies At The End starts off a little episodic in nature but that’s apparently due to the stylistic restraints of the original novel and, to be honest, you need to get to know the characters a little anyway. It doesn’t really matter... there is an overreaching story arc which soon makes itself apparent and luckily, for viewers like myself, it’s full of surreal manifestations and wild humour. In fact, in order to be able to interact with the world which Dave and John have set themselves up in (as kind of gory versions of the Ghostbusters, I guess), they have to be tripping on 'soy sauce', which is a drug that they both get from a guy called Bob Marley at a party. He may or may not be the real Bob Marley but, one thing is for sure, Marley and most of the guests at the party don’t survive the night and that’s when Dave is thrown in at the deep end and hilarity ensues. Wonderfully strange moments like receiving phone calls from John from different points in the story (and even when John is also sitting opposite him at one point), lead you into the harder and stranger stuff as the movie plays out. Things like a monster made up from the contents of a refrigerator, for example. Or a man who casts no reflection and whose arm Dave pulls off by accident... when Dave punches him, his moustache comes loose and starts flying around the room like an aggressive butterfly, trying to get in on the act. And then there’s the scene where Dave is saved by Amy’s dog, who drives his car through a wall to rescue him... this is all good stuff.

I’m trying to find something critical to say about this movie but, honestly, I can’t think of a single thing. The always reliable Brian Tyler composes a wonderful and appropriate modern horror style score for it when it’s needed most and it really supports the on screen action wonderfully. And the kinds of sequences Tyler is supporting are full of nicely clean (midst the often designer chaos and lived-in gore of the mise en scene) shots showcasing some lovely bright colours and it’s all edited together rather well. It’s a very surrealistic and, at times, less than linear path you are following as you make your way to the end of the movie but the editing is such that you really aren’t likely to get discombobulated by anything you see on screen and are probably just going to have a lot of fun with it.

And that’s about all I got to say about this one. I had a real blast with this movie and I am already recommending it to my friends because, really, they have to see this one. If you are already a fan of horror then you are probably also a fan of the less than serious side of the genre and will have no problem finding something to like in this one. You’ll definitely be cracking a smile or two if you chance it and I can imagine it would make a great double bill with something like Tucker And Dale Versus Evil (reviewed here). Give it a go.

Cosmopolis

Cos n’ Effect


Cosmopolis 2012
France/Canada/Portugal/Italy  
Directed by David Cronenberg
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: In reading this review you will be sitting 
in a metaphorical traffic jam with a load of spoilers
glancing at you from other lanes. Beware.

I should probably start off this little review with a warning that I haven’t actually read Don DeLillo’s novel, the one that Cronenberg took as his starting point for this work. So I don’t know if this movie version is actually a literal adaptation of the work or if Cronenberg has taken the spirit of it and done his own thing with it (like Naked Lunch, for example). What I can say, though, is that Cronenberg probably wouldn’t have touched this if the source material wasn’t already something which he responds to on an artistic level and it would be true to say that it fits nicely into his oeuvre and is especially in tune with his earlier works, although actual bodily decay/mutation is not an issue for the characters in this one.

Set in a world where the rich can rise or fall in a day due to the instability of the economy, a rich power player called Erik Packer, who looks a bit of a thug actually (Who the heck is Robert Pattinson? He looks like Tarantino and you just want to punch him.), embarks on a quest to be driven in his deluxe limo downtown to get his haircut... a journey which will take him all day and into the night and see his fortunes fall due to, and I paraphrase the words of one character, his inability to predict the random elements of nature within the patterns of the stock market figures, as represented metaphorically by the discovery of his asymmetrical prostate. During his day he plays host to numerous visitors both in his limousine and in various interior spaces, while worrying about a “credible death threat” and getting the pretty-boy veneer stripped from him as he shows his true thuggish nature by the end of the piece.

For a road movie, it’s a pretty claustrophobic one with the majority or the film (if not all of it, actually) shot in sets rather than locations (as far as I could tell). The visitors with whom he talks money or philosophy or poetry or has sex with include some fairly famous names giving fine performances (Juliette Binoche and Samantha Morton, to name two) and for the most part the script is quite dense and I’d normally find this pretty interesting but, I have to say, I spent a lot of my time in front of this movie feeling kinda bored. The attitude of the main character didn’t help this lethal malaise that infected me as I started watching his movie but, at the same time, I got the impression I was watching a future classic in that it so neatly dovetails into that “easy-to-decode” early Cronenberg phase. Well, I say early but I saw traces of eXistenZ in it too... in addition to some of his earlier works like Videodrome and the remarkable Crash.

Talking of which, I think the choice of lead actor, or at least his style of acting, is a definite shift for Cronenberg in that he used to use some pretty inspired and charismatic actors to portray the kind of cooled down, emotionally vacant characters he often populates his films with... James Woods, James Spader, Debbie Harry and Jeff Goldblum spring instantly to mind. Pattinson seems to throw less fire into his role but I don’t think that makes him any worse an actor than those other guys because of it. Contrarily, and possibly even serendipitously, Pattinson’s lack of presence may be the exact kind of stripped down perspective that both he and Cronenberg are going for in this one... and if that’s the case then it might be because the last scene in this movie which the narrative leads to is such an intense, suspenseful one.

Following the eye stabbing of a VIP live on television, as seen in Erik Packer’s limousine, the director further re-enforces the unexpected and damaging properties of violence with a brutal, point blank slaying of an important regular character towards the end of the film. You will see it coming... but still you feel the injustice of the decision made, just as the person responsible will have to embrace the consequences of this act later on, towards the end of the film. This wariness around tools of violence is the way that Cronenberg sets the scene for the final act of the movie, which is a double header between Robert Pattinson and the remarkable actor Paul Giametti as the target and the assassin come face to face with each other in a run down apartment. Steven Spielberg used a similar emotional device in the opening of Jurassic Park, when the power of the dinosaurs is demonstrated with deadly results to ramp up and heighten audience expectation and anxiety when we see these beasties again, for instance. As did David Lynch when he introduced his audience to Sailor Ripley in Wild At Heart with that notorious, literally head-banging, opening. What this does for Cronenberg’s movie is it gives it a very intense edge that one minute either actor could  shoot the other at any time during their long and twisty-turny conversation. This gets almost unbearable at times and makes me wonder if Pattinson isn’t such a bad actor after all, if he can credibly hold screen time against Giametti.

As I said earlier, Cronenberg’s obsession with physical decay and mutation is not mirrored in this movie but the story does concern itself with the gradual decline of the human mind after a day doesn’t quite go just as you’d expect it too. This is reflected in both protagonist and antagonist in the final scene and, frankly, if by that point you can still work out which one actually is protagonist and which is antagonist, then you’re doing well. This is also mirrored in the journey of the physical media the film is made up of, at least that’s what I thought, since the early shots of the terrain outside of the limousine look much like the fake, projected backdrop the director used deliberately in certain scenes of eXistenZ whereas, as Packer presumably gets poorer, everything starts to look a little more grimy and real... to the point where an incident leaves Packer messy and angry on the streets. The ramshackle set design of the place where Giametti’s character lives seems very much, to me at least, as an external projection of that “slow, body-horror mutation” that marked this director’s early works (or his early funny ones, if you will).

Another great thing which also harkens back to the early Cronenberg is the ending. I’ve been suckered in before with Cronenberg’s endings stopping a few seconds short of where you’d like them to end and he’s done exactly the same to me with this one. He puts you in a place where you are trying to figure out which of the two or three possible endings that Cronenberg has deftly lead you too will be the final, end game of the movie and... as the seconds drag on... your choices are suddenly taken away from you and I’ve definitely seen a few of his movies end in exactly the same way as this one did. It’s nice that there’s a certain symetry at work here... maybe Cronenberg’s prostate is less skewed than his main protagonist’s. Either way, it’s a nice way to finish and I certainly didn’t share the groan that the majority of the other six members of the audience, in the cinema that I saw it in, let out as a collective response to the commencement of the final credits.

If Cronenberg is your thing and you like his early work, especially Videodrome and eXistenZ, then you might like to give Cosmopolis a chance, although it has to be understood that my comparisons to these two works are not to be found in the surface details of the movie and if you look for them there then you will see no similarity, other than the very fluid, slow and steady camerawork that Cronenberg likes to view his ideas from. On the other hand, if you struggle with the emotional aspects of Cronenberg’s work usually, then you might be quite lost in this one since very few of the characters express themselves as being anything other than voyeurs to the events that are actually happening to them... and often don’t seem that present in the moment, getting drawn along in the wake of the cause and effect and ultimate downward spiral of... well... of following the flow of the money.

Personally I’m glad I saw this one but I have no idea if I could sit through it again... although I can see how his kind of movie could be best seen as a personal, individual experience with just the lone viewer and a DVD, as opposed to the normally preferred venue of the cinema. That is to say, Cosmopolis is a dish best served cold, perhaps?